Lauren Lake of Life Between the Bookends recently interviewed me for her website. She had a couple of questions that took me a little bit of time to ponder and answer.
One of the questions was the straightforward inquiry of Where did you get the idea for The Betrayal of Ka? Interestingly, I’d never directly answered that question. It wasn’t like I didn’t know, but I’d never put it into specific words. Here’s how I answered:
As I’ve heard others say, the book that I planned to write wasn’t the one that I ended up writing. When I decided that I would get serious about writing a novel, I started with an idea about an invasion of Earth. It began with two characters who resembled my two teenage sons in some respects. Before I finished the first chapter, I started having more and more questions about this nebulous invasion that I would be creating.
The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to create some social and political commentary on our situation on Earth. Additionally, I began asking what might happen if the invaders were more like us or even exactly like us. So my focus flipped to creating their world with a greedy corporate titan, a regulatory body rife with corruption, and a misaligned justice system. I wanted to avoid a heroic main character and create one with a redemption arc that can’t be entirely resolved, and one that might be unresolved depending on one’s point of view. In hindsight, the decision to write the book was more important than the specifics of what I was going to write.
Visit Life Between the Bookends to check out my complete interview with Lauren Lake.
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